


As If Ye Seen a Ghost

by NWCountrygirl17



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Gone but not forgotten, Grief/Mourning, ghost husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:42:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27592903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NWCountrygirl17/pseuds/NWCountrygirl17
Summary: They say time heals and lets you live. in the years following leaving Jamie Claire is struggling with finding purpose aside from being a mother to Bree. Help comes one night to remind her the only way to survive is being true to herself. My first Outlander Fic please Read and Review
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp & Brianna Randall Fraser MacKenzie, Claire Beauchamp/Frank Randall, Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	As If Ye Seen a Ghost

How many times would she have to sit through one of these insufferable Harvard dinners?

The sense of white-hot fury had been building in Claire since the first ten minutes of drinks being poured before dinner. She was so angry at the men who habitually condescended and dismissed her simply for being a woman, she was angry at Frank for his hand placed securely on her knee under the table feeling like a weight of iron to remind her to play the part she’d agreed to in this life in Boston in exchange for giving Brianna a living breathing father. More than anything she was enraged and hated herself for thinking that she could be alright living inside the box of a housewife that allowed nothing more than raising a child and tending to her husband.

“Claire really?”

“Don’t, Frank!” she hurled back. “Unless the next words out of your mouth are that I am never again going to be expected to endure a night like to tonight for the sake of _your_ career then do us both a favor and just don’t say anything at all.”

“Darling,”

“Give Mrs. Collins my thanks for staying late tonight I need to see Brianna.” She turned on her heel and went up the stairs to check on her daughter who would no doubt be sleeping like a rock by this hour. Her temper dissipated as she slipped into the dark bedroom and sat in the rocking chair. In the moonlight from the window, she could see the glint of the fiery red hair and the smile on the little girl’s face as she slept. “Jesus H Roosevelt Christ, how did I _ever_ think I could do this?”

“ _Because you made me a promise, mo nighean donn_ ,” The ghost of a Scottish accent Claire could never have forgotten came to her followed by the image of James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser himself. “ _A promise that I made you keep that day at the stones. My one consolation was that I could save you and our bairn_ ,”

“I know, she is so like you.” the smile she wore at even the echo of Jamie’s voice was small, she didn’t take her eyes off Bree for fear the fetch would disappear if she tried to look at it. “What are you doing here?”

“ _I’m here, my Sassenach, because ye need me_ ,” he beamed at her; lip curling into his irresistible smile as he used his old pet name for her. “ _Ye once told me that ye weren’t the meek and obedient type. Why in God’s name are you trying to act like you are now_?”

“Christ, I got more respect when I was coerced into becoming the healer of Leoch,” Claire let out a frustrated groan and sure enough that this was going to be a conversation that it was safe to look at Jamie. “But this is the way things are here, I’m a mother, a professor’s wife, I’m expected to concern myself with domestic duties and gossiping to my fellow married women.”

“ _Claire, when have the expectations of others ever been a chief consideration of yours_?” Jamie asked edging closer to her swiftly moving to one knee at the side of her chair. “ _Or are ye trying to tell me that those sheep herded bastards, who wouldn’t know good dram if it was thrown in their face, are easier to win over than Colum Mackenzie?_ ”

“There are moments I imagine we are back in the surgery that night we listened to Gwyllyn play,” she smiled at the memory, Castle Leoch had been peaceful and almost inviting to her that night. “It was one of the first times I allowed myself to feel the intimacy between us. I tried to pretend it was only treating your injuries, but there was so much more than that.”

“ _Aided by Colum’s rhenish no doubt_ ,” his clear deep blue eyes were sparkling now. “ _Christ, how badly did I want to touch you even then? Ye ken it was all I could do to not take ye in my arms until we forgot there was anyone else in the world._ ”

“This from the man who wouldn’t even sleep on the floor of my room for fear of tarnishing my reputation,” Claire couldn’t help letting out a laugh as she summoned up the memory of hearing a sound outside her door and trampling an over-protective young Scot. “We got there, eventually didn’t we? There was plenty of time for that on our wedding night.”

“ _Aye_ ,” he was grinning too ears turning red. Then he changed his expression growing serious. “ _Sassenach, I sent you and Brianna away to protect ye, didna mean for ye to be miserable for the rest of yer life_.”

“What do you suggest I do then?” she snapped annoyed. Jamie had broken her heart the day he made her return through the stones. “The day Brianna was born it was like getting a piece of you back. I swear sometimes when she’s concentrating, I hear her make those Scot noises you did.”

“ _Aye, she has the spirit of the highlands in her blood_ ,” Jamie followed her gaze to the sleeping girl. “ _I hope somehow she kens that one day, feels in her heart that the man who fathered her loved you both more than life_.”

“She will, I don’t know how yet but I promise you, she will know the truth someday,” Claire’s voice broke, so many times she’d asked herself the same questions. What if Culloden never happened? What would raising her child with Jamie be like, assuming both she and Brianna survived the birth. “God knows how I will ever explain to her, it’s a miracle you believed me after Cranesmuir.”

“ _Ye will find a way to make her understand. Because yer the most stubborn determined woman I ever knew, Claire,_ ” He always did have an unnerving level of faith in her. From the moment she’d scolded him for not telling her he was shot before he fell off a horse in the middle of the night, he’d never ceased his confidence in her abilities. “ _Ye ken, save for when we were together in the throes of love, I never saw you happier than when you were helping people, healing the sick an injured_.”

“It was a role that I was suited for,” that was true enough after going through the stones she’d adapted out of a sheer need of survival. If Claire was being honest with herself, she’d taken to like the post of de-facto healer in the castle. “People may not have liked my presence but that didn’t matter it became a necessity and they learned to deal with it.”

“ _Ye earned their respect, Sassenach, that’s no small feat.”_ Did this vision of her husband know any more than the original had that Claire would have been lost entirely without him? _“Ye beat odds through Leoch, Paris, through the damned Rising and saved my life on more than one occasion._ ”

“For all the good it ended up doing,” she said bitterly, they had tried so hard sacrificed, and suffered so much but in the end; what was told to happen happened. “There are days I don’t know how I managed to get this far, what am I supposed to do to survive in this life, Jamie?”

“ _Be the woman who grasped my heart from the first, my wife, our daughter’s mother_ ,” he put a hollow hand to her cheek, what she wouldn’t give to feel the warmth of his touch again. “ _Be Claire Fraser… in spirit if not in name._ ”

“How,”

“Mama?” the bundle of blankets stirred in the bed as Brianna rubbed her eyes turning to what had roused her from sleep.

“ _She canna see or hear me_ ,” Jamie said moving with Claire as she approached their daughter and took her place at the side edge of the bed. “ _She might ken that there’s someone with her though, always_.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, sweetheart,” Claire whispered, “It’s late, go back to sleep.”

“Will you sing me the _lass song_ Mama?”

“Bree,” Claire had always been careful about what she sang as a lullaby, and Brianna’s favorite was reserved for when Frank was working late and not in the house. “Not tonight my love,”

“Please,”

“ _Ye better do it Sassenach_ ,” Jamie beamed, damn him even as a ghost his pride in what he’d passed down was evident. “ _She’s a stubborn Fraser as ever there was one_.”

 _And who’s fault is that? You stay out of this._ She shot mentally at him, before looking back to the little girl still eagerly seeking her own way. “Alright once through and not a peep from you till tomorrow morning, deal?”

“Deal.”

“Now lie back and close your eyes,” Claire, reset the covers and pushed the sleep jostled hair out of her face.

_Sing me a song of a lass that is gone  
Say could that lass be I?  
Merry of soul she sailed on a day  
Over the sea to sky_

_Billow and breeze island a seas  
Mountains of rain and sun  
All that was good all that was fair  
All that was me is gone_

_Sing me a song of a lass that is gone  
Say could that lass be I  
Merry of soul she sailed on a day  
Over the see… to sky_

The song worked as it always did Brianna’s face relaxed into a settled calm and her breathing slowed until she was sound asleep by the final line. “ _My mother used to sing that to Jenny and Willie and me. Heard Jenny sing it to her own bairns many times_.”

“Where do think I learned it?”

“Claire,” the reverie of mother, ghost father, and sleeping child was broken by a voice from the open doorway. “A word,”

 _“Don’t leave,”_ she thought immediately to Jaime moving from the bed. “ _Please,”_

“ _I’m here mo nighean donn_ ,”

“She’s back sound asleep,” Claire didn’t speak again till they were back downstairs in the living room. “What is it?”

“What is it?” he repeated in the voice of her professor asking for unfinished due homework. “You know what, must you sing that damn _Scottish_ song to her?”

“You say Scottish like it’s a curse,”

“And you mean to say that it’s not?” Franks's tone was even but his eyes held the same cold fury she had seen many times from a redcoat captain named Randall. “What you’re doing could plant questions in her head. Questions that we both know don’t have answers.”

“It’s a lullaby from stories so old I doubt anyone actually knows it’s origins,” he was being ridiculous, there was no way a 4-year-old could divine just how accurate the fantastical stories she liked to hear were. “It’s hardly the stuff of a genetic profile.”

“You walk a razor's edge, Claire Beauchamp.”

“She likes it,” she said defiantly, yes, they had agreed to keep Bree’s heritage a secret but that wouldn’t change that it was the truth, and a truth she had a right to. “It comforts her, more to the point it’s a song passed down mother to child for generations. I’m not going to take that sense of calm from Brianna, Frank. If that bothers you, I suggest you find a way to deal with it.”

“ _Dinna think that wine is gonna be enough_ ,” Jamie said a bitter smile in his voice. “ _Ye ken whiskey is always more effective_.”

“True but nothing I have on hand tonight would be a strong as I need it to be.” 

“D’ye hate me Sassenach?” he asked stepping beside her on the balcony, they were alone again. “ _For sending you back through the stones, to this_?”

“No, Christ I wanted to, but no,” For all his faults Claire had given Jamie her whole heart, she couldn’t hate him for the sacrifice he made. “Culloden had come. We couldn’t stop it and we couldn’t win, you sent us away to save us and you did.”

“ _I was right, what I said that night in Edinburgh_ ,”

“Hmm?”

“ _Damn all Randalls_ ,”

“You do remember that includes me,” she said wryly. “Me and our daughter,”

“ _Och, nah, Brianna is Fraser and Makenzie whether she kens it or no_ ,” he was right about that as well; it wasn’t just her bright copper locks slanted blue cat eyes or cheekbones that were already giving signs of being fine and Viking. Her eyes held the promise of stubbornness she could only inherit from Clan Fraser. “ _And you, mo nighean donn, you made your choice, when it was yer’s to make_ ,”

“I know you never liked to talk about it,” She said apologetically. “But there was a time that I loved him too.”

“ _Past tense, ye’ll forgive me for pointing out the irony_ ,” he made a sound of Scottish derision. “ _but what it is between us… the things we shared_.”

“Rarer than once in a lifetime,” again Claire had a flash of the night listening to Gwyllyn on the harp as Jamie translated from Gaelic. If only she had known that soon she’d never want to leave the man who would become her true home. “And certainly longer than every two hundred years. You’re gone, I know you died on that damnable moor. How is it possible I can still feel you?”

“ _Long ago I told you that I was yer master, and you were mine_ ,” He reminded her with the same young invincible gleam in his eyes that he’d ad on that particular night. “ _I’ve been dead for two centuries, Claire, and my soul remains yours. I meant every vow I made to you on our wedding day_ ,”

“You know I didn’t mean them at the time or I didn’t think I did,” she considered when she’d said her vows and in the early days and weeks of their marriage, all she thought she wanted was to find a way back to the stones. She’d thought that right until the moment Jamie had taken her there and tried to release her. “Better or worse sickness and health till death do we part, I made those same promises to him.”

“ _Aye_ ,” he took Claire’s hand and kissed the faint scar across her wrist, the spot Dougal Makenzie had cleanly sliced with a dirk when they had wed. “ _But you didna promise him blood of yer blood and bone of yer bone. Sassenach that’s a vow you made only to me_.”

“I love you,” it seemed so small to say even to an echo of him, but she had to none the less. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it more when I had the chance.”

“ _I never needed the words to know the truth of yer heart, Sassenach_ ,” Jamie turned her hand over and pressed his lips against the silver band he’d given her. “ _I love you too, forever_. _T_ _housands of miles, 200 years, death itself cannae change that._ ”

“I wish you were here,” Claire blinked, and Jamie was gone. “I wish we didn’t have to leave you.”

Claire woke the next morning feeling more peace than she had since they had come to Boston. In truth, it was more peace than she had felt since the morning she woke up in Jamie Fraser’s arms in an abandoned shack low on Craig Na Dun. A task was clear before her when she opened her eyes. She didn’t even realize the plan had been forming in last night’s pool of anger quelled by grief and subsequent dreams of memory, and yet there it was as apparent as a circle of standing stones on a green Scottish hill guided there by a voice that rang in her ears. “ _Be the woman who grasped my heart from the first, be Claire Fraser_.”

Jamie had been right, she had to survive the best she could for Brianna’s sake and for her own. Claire knew if she had any hope of doing that she couldn’t keep pretending she was some demure, content, closed mouth woman. There was going to be fighting and there was going to be struggle – really in her life that was nothing new – but she would be a shade of herself again. The first step was telling Frank. _Be Claire Fraser._

“Good morning,” Frank said carefully looking up from his morning paper. “Claire about last night.”

“I need to speak with you,”

“Alright,” He sounded almost hopeful. Did he think she was going to apologize for her outburst and say she understood? “What is it?”

“I’m going to enroll in medical school.”

**Author's Note:**

> this wouldn't leave my head till I finished it. Claire and even Ghost Jamie are just so precious hope I did their incredible love story justice... considering a follow-up chapter where Jamie receives a ghostly visitor


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